Breathtaking new frog surprise

The discovery that this rare frog, living in Borneo, has no lungs, is being used to promote evolution. But as the article shows, this is off the mark.

Making headlines is an amazing discovery about a unique species of frog. The amphibian
is described as ‘bizarre’, a fitting epithet given that it is missing
lungs altogether (the wordplay in the title is intentional).1 The 5 cm (2 inch) long Barbourula kalimantanensis
lives in the jungles of Borneo, and apparently gets all the oxygen it needs through
its skin. It was first known about some 30 years ago, but being very rare, only
one other specimen has been discovered to date, and neither was dissected.

Some of the media descriptions associate the frog with the word ‘primitive’,
a term loaded with evolutionary connotations. But is it somehow an intermediate,
a form closer to some ancestor that had not evolved lungs yet? Not at all; even
most informed evolutionists would agree with the conclusion that it is almost certainly
descended from a frog that once had lungs.

We can ‘connect the dots’ to lead to a very likely scenario of how this
species arose.

Frogs with lungs already get a significant amount of their oxygen through the skin—this
is absorbed directly from the water.

Even though its habitat is close to the equator, the streams that B. kalimantanensis
lives in are very fast-flowing and extremely cold. Such waters contain large amounts
of dissolved oxygen.

There is a very similar species of frog in the Philippines that does have lungs,
and the two may well be descendants of the same created kind.

If one such frog with lungs happened to have a (information-losing, hence not evolutionary
in the ‘microbes to man’ sense) mutation causing lungs to disappear
or dramatically reduce, then the descendants of such a frog exhibiting this loss/defect
would

Be well able to survive in their oxygen-rich home waters, using the existing mechanism
of skin-breathing. But in addition:

They would actually be at a selective advantage compared to their lung-equipped
co-members of the population. In such fast-moving streams, those with lungs (which
make the creature float) would be more likely to be carried away from the breeding
population. Also:

Without lungs, the body would flatten more readily, increasing the available surface
area for skin-breathing still more.

Although such fascinating features of the natural world are always trumpeted in
evolution-supporting terms, they actually make far more sense in a framework of
Genesis history

Thus, just as in the case of the blind cave fish that have ‘devolved’
from fish with eyes (see this
article), natural selection would soon ensure that the entire population
was lungless. Such a downhill change would only need a few generations, especially
in a small isolated population. No vast time spans are required.

Although such fascinating features of the natural world are always trumpeted in
evolution-supporting terms, they actually make far more sense in a framework of
Genesis history. Vast amounts of information were created in separate biological
populations at the beginning, and the direction of biological change since creation
has been overwhelmingly downhill—the very opposite of the grand-scale claims
of evolution.

References

Published: 9 April 2008(GMT+10)

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